Bonded Recourse for Smart-Contract Settlement of Compensable Agent Side Effects

Abstract

Autonomous agent runtimes execute tool actions that mutate databases, repositories, and cloud services across organizational boundaries. Authorization and local compensation cover pre-action admission and in-runtime rollback, but neither settles the residual harm left after a permitted action fails. We design Recourse, a smart-contract settlement protocol for compensable agent side effects that binds each admitted action to scope, recovery, evidence, payout, and collateral. Recourse separates ex ante eligibility from ex post objective settleability: typed receipts make objective residual claims computable under an optimistic-oracle challenge pattern, while subjective or incomplete claims route to ERC-792 arbitration or exclusion. We implement the contract suite, deploy it on Base Sepolia, build adapters against Postgres, Git, and cloud-compatible local sandboxes, and evaluate the system on a deterministic harness, sandbox traces, adversarial sweeps, and property-based fuzzing. Against authorization-only and local-compensation baselines, bonded coverage cuts uncompensated harm. The on-chain tier supplies neutral custody, public challenge, non-cooperative payout, and portable history under cross-organizational trust assumptions.